Vera, or Faith
A Novel
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4.1 • 68 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A poignant and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter, by the bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Our Country Friends
LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, Washington Post, NPR, Oprah Daily, Vox, Denver Public Library, Seattle Times, The Cap Times, Kirkus Reviews
“Pull up a beach chair: The book of the summer is here. . . . A poignant Harriet the Spy–esque delight.”—People (Book of the Week)
“Genius . . . [a] miracle.”—The Washington Post
“A novel you can read in one sitting that will stay with you forever.”—Karen Russell
“Very funny, very sad, very sharp, and completely delightful.”—Elif Batuman
“A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A must-read.”—Los Angeles Times
“Shteyngart is one of the best comedians in literature today.”—BookPage (starred review)
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.
Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.
Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Vera, or Faith demonstrates why Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, "one of his generation's most exhilarating writers."
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If you wish you had all the answers and could solve every problem, then you’ll certainly find common ground with 10-year-old Vera, the heroine of Gary Shteyngart’s short near-future novel. Despite being full of facts and great at math and chess, Vera has a tough time making friends and reading social cues. She can’t fix her parents’ troubled marriage, get funding for her father’s intellectual magazine, figure out exactly what happened to her biological mother, or understand the drive to give an enhanced vote to white citizens who can trace their ancestry back to the Revolutionary War. But she’s certainly going to try her best to succeed at any or all of these, even if her only allies are her AI chessboard and the family’s self-driving car. Vera may be navigating a fractured future, but her earnest search for clarity and connection feels heartbreakingly familiar.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A blended family negotiates internal and external tensions in the affecting and lightly speculative latest from Shteyngart (Our Country Friends). At 10, Vera Shmulkin is a sponge for language. She keeps a running journal of phrases spoken by her Russian immigrant father, Igor, a public intellectual and "manfluencer" who worries the family will lose their "merely rich" status in billionaire-friendly New York City if he fails to sell the "once-famous" magazine he's attempting to rehab. Meanwhile, Vera's Boston Brahman stepmother, Anne Mom, leads a resistance group against a proposed constitutional amendment that would supercharge enfranchisement for citizens such as Anne, whose family tree stretches back to the colonial era, but would marginalize Igor and Vera, the latter because her birth mother, Mom Mom, whom Vera never knew, came from Korea. After Igor fails to show at Anne's fundraiser, their fights and Igor's heavy drinking worry Vera, who becomes convinced that her father is a Russian spy. The various plotlines are provocative and clever, but most are underdeveloped save for Vera's determination to track down Mom Mom, which builds to a dramatic climax and satisfying conclusion. Readers will go all in for this story's singular heroine.
Customer Reviews
Worth the read
I almost didn’t read this because when I searched for it, there was only one review with only 2 stars. However, I decided to ignore it and started reading the sample. The story immediately drew me in and I was hooked. How interesting it was to experience Vera’s world through her eyes.
So so
I struggled to get into this book and did all the way to the end. I was glad when it was finished. Felt more like a chore to read this book.